The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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Turner, Joe Ross to #Nationals. Myers, Hanigan, Jose Castillo to #Padres. Souza, Ott, Rivera, Smith, Bauers to #Rays (Souza, Ott from Nats).

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 17, 2014

Generally speaking, in such cases as a prospect — or any player, really — possesses a combination of power and speed, said player is regarded with some interest by what is referred to broadly as the “scouting community.” While sabermetricians have (in the past, at least) cultivated a reasonable suspicion about such players — or, at least the level of enthusiasm exhibited on their behalfs — it’s also true that those players who’ve both (a) demonstrated power and speed have also generally (b) developed into above-average major leaguers.

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Someday, an up-and-coming SABR scientist should try to measure the psychic effect that losing has on ballplayers. As everyone knows from watching “The Natural,” losing is a disease — as contagious as polio, syphilis and bubonic plague. Attacking one but infecting all, though some more than others. And no other major leaguer over the past decade, among hitters, lost as frequently as Josh Willingham did.

Willingham, 35, recently announced his retirement after playing nine full seasons and parts of two more. What a relief it must have been for him to finish as a part-timer with the Kansas City Royals, who made it to the seventh game of the World Series. Only once before had Willingham played significant time for winning team (with the Florida Marlins in 2008), and never had he played in the postseason. Cross it off the list, call it a career. And it was a good one, aside from all of the losing.

Overall, his teams went 503-644 in Willingham’s appearances, producing a .439 winning percentage, the worst among anyone who recorded at least 4,000 plate appearances since he broke into the majors in 2004. It usually wasn’t Willingham’s fault that his team lost; he was the best hitter on the Marlins as a rookie, after Miguel Cabrera, and he was better than Hanley Ramirez. He was the fourth-best hitter in ’07, the third-best in ’08 — and in ’09 and ’10 after being traded to the Washington Nationals. He was the best hitter on the Oakland Athletics in 2011, and the Minnesota Twins in 2012.  It’s just that Willingham’s teams lost anyway.

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Ten years ago, everyone wanted young pitching. It was the considered the currency of baseball, the thing you could always trade if you needed to acquire something else. But these days, random kids on the street can throw 100 mph, the strike zone is gigantic, and preventing runs is now the easy part of the game. What everyone wants now is offense, and seemingly, offense in the form of good right-handed hitters.

This seems a reaction to the fact that the league’s platoon splits have gotten larger over the last few years; specifically, left-handed hitters have been exploited more often by left-handed pitching. Here is the league average wRC+ for LHP vs LHB match-ups in each year since 2002:

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The Washington Nationals are in an enviable position. The team won 96 games for the second time in three years before bowing out in the division series. They are a talented group, well-built with one of the best rotations in baseball plus a high-octane offense to match.

They are certainly a World Series favorite for 2015 with the talent on-hand. They’re also a team coming to a crossroads. They are in the enviable position of choosing between living for today or planning for the future. Or, most likely of all, they’ll take care of one without tossing the other aside.

As the hot stove season heats up, a number of high-profile Nats names will pop up with regularity. Among their core talent, they have four very good players heading towards free agency at the end of the 2015 season. Jordan Zimmermann, Ian Desmond, Doug Fister, and Denard Span all figure to attract their share of attention as the Nats cannot retain all four players at market prices – to say nothing of workhorse reliever Tyler Clippard.

So what options might general manager Mike Rizzo explore? A rumor connecting Zimmermann and the Chicago Cubs was quickly shot down, but the logical match of the two clubs demonstrates the world at the feet of the Nats front office. They have multiple options in front of them, the best of which requires trading the man who threw a no-hitter in his final regular season start of 2014.

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The days of having to rail against runs batted in as a particularly useful indicator of individual offensive value are long behind us. That does not mean there might not be potentially interesting research to do on situational hitting or the like, but simply that the straight-up use of RBI is not something that really needs to be debated.

Nonetheless, it is still interesting to see what sorts of hitters can accumulate high numbers of RBI, something we recognize with an award named for two players who managed big RBI numbers despite less than impressive advanced hitting metrics: the John Carter-Tony Bautista Award.

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With a 4-1 victory over the Giants last night, the Nationals breathed a little life into their hopes of advancing past the NDLS. Tonight, they look to win another game in San Francisco, and the pitching match-up certainly looks to be in their favor, as Gio Gonzalez takes on Ryan Vogelsong. Gonzalez, however, is not exactly known for pitching deep into ballgames, which brings up an interesting question for Matt Williams tonight: would he be willing to use Stephen Strasburg as his first option out of the bullpen?

Due to the scheduled off-days both on Sunday and tomorrow, the Nationals have the option of starting either Strasburg or Jordan Zimmermann on full rest in a potential Game Five. Zimmermann shut down the Giants on Saturday, finishing one out shy of a complete game, and was actually the team’s best starter this season, even though he doesn’t have Strasburg’s raw stuff. The availability of Zimmmermann to start Game Five creates an interesting option for the Nationals to use Strasburg out of the bullpen in order to give the team their best chance of getting to that game, and Matt Williams said yesterday that Strasburg was available in relief in an “extreme emergency” situation.

Interestingly, Kilgore also wrote this in a separate piece: Read the rest of this entry »

Three walks don’t seem like a big deal. Even if Doug Fister only gave up three walks once all year, you could look at the box score for Game Three of the National League Division Series and think, sure he had a Fisterian game. Nine ground balls to six fly balls, not many walks, a few strikeouts, and you look up and the Nationals have won behind him.

Except it didn’t really play out like that. Fister walked two of those three batters in the first inning. He went to eight pitches to get Joe Panik out. He went to five-plus pitches six more times before he got six outs. This was a man who averaged 3.7 pitches per batter faced during the regular season, averaging 4.8 pitches per batter in the first two innings. A man who once told us that he wants bad contact “in the first three pitches.”

After the game, Fister admitted that there was something going on early.

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On Saturday night, Matt Williams removed Jordan Zimmermann with one out to go, trying to preserve a 1-0 lead. Drew Storen entered immediately gave up a single to Buster Posey and a double Pablo Sandoval, tying the game at 1-1; the Giants would go on and win in 18. Williams was heavily criticized in the aftermath of the game for taking a pitcher out who was, at that, throwing a shutout, especially given that he had only thrown 100 pitches on the night.

But let’s just look at the numbers here for a second. We’ll look at career and 2014 batting against both pitchers.

On a per-batter faced, Drew Storen has been a more effective pitcher than Jordan Zimmermann. This shouldn’t be a big surprise, since good relievers are almost always the hardest guys in all of baseball to hit, and Storen is a very good reliever.

And as you’re probably sick of reading about by now, pitchers get worse the more often they face the same hitter within the same game. Here are Zimmermann’s career splits by times through the order:

The first time Zimmermann faces a hitter in a game, he’s lights out. Second time, still pretty good. Third time, he’s roughly league average. The fourth match-up has been a disaster for him.

And yes, Zimmermann was throwing the ball well on Saturday night, but you only get to face a guy a fourth time through the order if you’re pitching well, so that entire data pool is essentially comprised of performances against Zimmermann late in games in which he had already performed at a high level. 81 plate appearances is of course a small sample, but both the league-wide and Zimmermann-specific trends are clear; his performance declines the longer he stays in, and by the time a hitter has already faced him three times, they hit him pretty well.

Even if we cherry pick the numbers, we can’t come up with a scenario where the expected line against Storen would be worse than against Zimmermann. Storen’s career .273 wOBA allowed is better than Zimmermann’s career-best .280 wOBA allowed this year, so even if we give Zimmermann credit for his 2014 performance and still hold Storen’s entire career line against him, Zimmermann still loses out. Add in any kind of times-through-the-order penalty and it ceases to even be remotely close.

Storen was the right call. It didn’t work, but that doesn’t make the move a mistake.

This is a story all about how an umpire flipped-turned a playoff game upside down.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the outcome of Saturday night’s marathon game between Washington and San Francisco entirely on fourth-year umpire Vic Carapazza, working in his first MLB postseason. I would never do that. Despite what disgruntled fans might lead you to believe, the blame for a team’s loss can never be placed on the shoulders of one individual. Especially not in a game that lasted 18 innings.

There are countless factors that played into Washington’s loss, and that’s been reflected in the media’s coverage of this game. The offense went scoreless for 15 innings after taking a 1-0 lead in the third. Many have focused on manager Matt Williams‘ decision to remove starting pitcher Jordan Zimmermann after a walk in the ninth. Some have focused on… the male genitalia? But a lot of attention has turned to Carapazza, who had a shaky strike zone and ejected Williams and shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera in the bottom of the 10th for arguing balls and strikes.

Cabrera and Williams need to keep their cool in that situation, but, boy, did Vic Carapazza have himself a rough night.
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